With the advent of distributed computing environments, such as the Internet, users are often asked to provide various types and amounts of personal information to other users, businesses, government agencies, educational institutions, and the like. For example, if a user desires to reserve a restaurant table via a restaurant web page, the user may be asked for her name, telephone number, and possibly a credit card number. At the other end of the information spectrum, if a user requests a personal credit report from a credit reporting agency, the user may be asked for her name, address, previous address, social security number, place of employment, credit card and loan numbers, etc. In addition to the foregoing, users often inadvertently disclose certain types of information, including personally-identifiable information, such as metadata associated with a document the user prepares/edits and distributes.
A number of problems are associated with the foregoing information exchanges. First, personal information owners/users do not have a single location to store and update personal information. That is, users must supply personal information to each information requester on an individual basis. As personal information for a given user changes, the user must contact all parties with out-of-date information to update those parties, or the user must supply updated information on a case-by-case basis as the user needs goods, services, or other from an interested party. Secondly, the user has no way of efficiently tracking which parties should get updated personal information. Additionally, because personal information raises many security concerns, the user has no efficient method of controlling future or subsequent use of the personal information, or of detecting unauthorized leaks of personal information.
Accordingly, there is a need for methods and systems for managing and securing personal information. It is with respect to these and other considerations that the present invention has been made.